


light a flamethrower

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: draco dormiens nunquam titillandus [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Primeval
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, the wizarding world post-1998 is full of child soldiers and traumatised Muggleborns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 19:38:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7946596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caroline Steel - half-blood, double agent, and cosmetics enthusiast - in the last year of the War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	light a flamethrower

**Author's Note:**

> Set prior to Alas, Earwax - backstory for my enormous crossover fic, but you don't really need that to understand any of this. Fits Denial’s July prose prompt about it being better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness. Thanks to Fred for the beta!

            Caroline Steel cried when they sent her father to Azkaban.

 

            There were few private places left to cry in Hogwarts under the Carrows and few teachers a student could trust, though Professor McGonagall’s eyes were kind when they fell on Caroline. The teachers were often wary of their Slytherin students, and Professor Snape, who Caroline might have trusted enough to speak to, was both Headmaster and a person she couldn’t have brought herself to cry in front of. Professor Slughorn, her Head of House, would have patted her on the shoulder and given her sweets and tried to soothe her, but there was a little worried crease between his eyebrows he couldn’t smooth away, and Caroline knew he would not be able to help her – though he had offered, when the news came on the third page of the _Daily Prophet_ , the stiff lines of an owl her mother had sent knowing it would be intercepted.

 

           Caroline’s friends were too frightened to comfort her, and the prefects looked on her father’s blood as her shame, rather than his imprisonment as her grief. And they knew all the little nooks and crannies and hiding places that Caroline knew, where she might have taken herself to sob. Maybe the Gryffindors and the Hufflepuffs and the Ravenclaws knew of a few more, but they were hardly likely to talk to Slytherins they didn’t already know well, and it would be dangerous for Caroline to associate with them. Especially considering that her few good friends outside her House had not come back to school this year. Caroline wasn’t actually sure how many were Muggleborn and how many were blood traitors, but it wouldn’t have been safe to ask.

 

            So Caroline learnt to cast silencing wards on the heavy green curtains of her four-poster bed, and cried herself to sleep every night. She woke up in the morning and spelled a little cool water into a handkerchief, dabbed at her red and swollen eyes as her mother had taught her to, easing their puffiness and soreness. She took a tube of concealer to the spots that broke out on her stressed forehead and the deep bags under her eyes, tied her hair up so she couldn’t fidget with it nervously, filed her nails to unbiteable rounded edges and piled balm onto her lips to ease them, so she couldn’t quite chew them to rags.

 

            She looked in the mirror and saw her father’s handsome face, sharp cheekbones, light skin and eyes tilted up at the corners; but her hair was as black and corkscrew-curled as her mother’s, and she had her mother’s full lips and strong nose. At least she looked a little like a Fawley. Alecto Carrow had remarked on it one Muggle Studies lesson – that at least some of her pure blood showed, and at least she was in the right sort of house.

 

            Caroline had dipped her head modestly, and kept very close to herself the fact that she was in the same House as her Muggleborn father had been. Amaranth Fawley had been a Hufflepuff.

 

***

 

            “Who are you trying so hard for?” Genevieve Thaxted sneered, trying to trip her up on the moving stairs.

 

            “I take care of myself,” Caroline said calmly, touching up her tinted lip-balm in the reflection of a well-polished suit of armour. “Maybe if you took care of yourself, you wouldn’t have such bad skin.”

 

            Genevieve stormed away.

 

           Caroline rubbed her lips carefully together, and stared blankly into her own reflection, seeing her dreams from the night before: her father, screaming for help, her father, a broken man on a filthy stone floor. Her father, surrounded by the death-rattle breathing of Dementors, without even his wand, because the Ministry said he’d stolen it.

 

            Caroline knew her father was magic to his fingertips, a talented wizard, and her mother knew it too. But Caroline knew that the only way for her mother to keep at least two of the three of them alive would have been to moderate her protests – and Caroline knew that that would have been her father’s plan, too.

 

            “Aren’t you late for classes?” Astoria Greengrass demanded, startling her.

 

            “Not yet,” Caroline said, and flashed a smile she was getting better at. “D’you think I could buy some tweezers in Hogsmeade?”

 

            “I’ve never found a decent pair yet. You can borrow mine tonight and owl-order a pair for yourself, if you’re that worried.”

 

            “Thanks,” Caroline said, and scuttled up the stairs to Arithmancy.

 

***

 

            Caroline’s fifteenth birthday came with a few cards and a few presents. She smiled through it, diamond-hard and blithe as a shark, and cried into her pillow at night.

 

            Prisoners don’t write from Azkaban.

 

***

 

            Caroline had stopped into the girls’ bathroom to touch up her mascara and smudge dark frosted eyeshadow further into her crease when she heard the whispering. _Cruciatus. Compulsory. Fourth year_. _Tomorrow._

 

            Caroline’s heart did a painful double-thud. She straightened her skirt and robes. She had Amycus Carrow for the Dark Arts tomorrow.

 

            When the two sixth-year girls came out of the stall they had been hiding in, all there was to see was Caroline, nose practically touching the mirror, carefully separating her clumped lashes with the tip of her index finger. She leaned back on her heels, nodded to herself, and then gave the girls a small, meaningless smile before walking away to her Potions class.

 

            Caroline had food poisoning the next day, bad enough that she missed all her classes. So did Astoria Greengrass. It must have been something they ate. Nobody else liked cabbage.

 

            They didn’t have to cast the Cruciatus Curse that day.

 

***

 

            _It was an accident_ , Caroline told herself. _I can’t count on ever having another chance._

 

            _What if I_ made _myself another chance?_

 

***

 

            If you made your frightened glances look enchanted, Caroline realised, people thought you were hanging on their every word because you were enthralled by them. Sometimes that made them talk just enough, and if you replied to something different, sounding smitten, looking a little emboldened, they might think that you’d never heard the point of what they’d said. That they thought you believed they were brave and principled pureblood warriors, not sniping carrion-birds and cannibal giants.

 

            It turned out that if you passed Luna Lovegood a note, she would quite understand why you didn’t feel safe enough to join Dumbledore’s Army – you still had a defenceless father in prison, after all. She would happily take your information and pretend not to know who you were. She might even suggest where you could get some more, dressed in immaculate Slytherin green or your mother’s family colours, old-fashioned robes rather than the loose jeans and halterneck tops your mother had been too clever to let you pack.

 

            Caroline would take that bargain.

 

***

 

            Theo Nott thought she was pretty and Theo Nott couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Caroline played sweet and shy, let him steal a kiss or two, sat on the arm of his chair and cast her eyes down.

 

            Theo Nott let slip that Aurors were coming to arrest Neville Longbottom.

 

            Caroline made sure they never found him.

 

***

            “Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure,” the Bloody Baron remarked, floating through the wall of one of the secret tunnels Luna had told Caroline about.

 

             Caroline almost drew her wand on him.

 

            The Bloody Baron fixed an eye on her that did not disapprove. “But knowledge is power.”

 

            Caroline lowered her wand and waited.

 

            “No-one will find out from me that you were here,” the Bloody Baron said, in the slow, deep voice that had frightened and soothed centuries of young Slytherins in equal measure. “And I shall take care of Peeves and his loose tongue.”

 

            “Thank you, sir,” Caroline said softly.

 

***

 

           Caroline tasted grief when she closed her eyes and anger when she opened them. And she made fuel of them both.

 

 


End file.
